• I READ with dismay about the plight of the residents of the England’s Lane hostel in Belsize park and of how they are being forced to move outside the borough, (Hostel families told to move to Yorkshire amid ‘massive’ housing shortage, January 21).

When Camden extended the hostel’s lease by six years, in 2015, you would have thought that contingency planning would have taken place, for the future rehousing of the hostel’s residents.

Given that over 700 council homes are available to be relet each year there were always going to be enough homes to rehouse the hostel’s households, in the borough of Camden, had sufficient planning had taken place. This seems to have been too much of an ask for the council.

If ever one would need confirmation of this tendency for incompetence, one would only need to take a 10-minute walk from the hostel, down to Haverstock Road, to witness what looks like a World War II bomb site but should actually be a new block of 290 council-built homes, scheduled to have been completed three years ago.

Even if the residents of the England’s Lane hostel could not all have been accommodated in some of the council properties that become vacant each year the rest could have been rehoused in some of the new homes, on Haverstock Road, had the scheme been delivered on time.

That fact that they cannot, stands as cruel testimony to how everything this Labour council touches turns to waste.

KEITH SEDGWICK
Fortune Green Road, NW6